Thursday, November 26, 2020

The Keep Going Song - The Bengsons

My friend Jan sent me a link to a song that really touched my heart so I want to share it with you too. It's a song for our times. A spontaneous prayer to connect us all and fill our hearts with all the deepest, most rich feelings we are capable of and give us the courage to just Keep Going on! Much love, Llyn

If you are curious (as I was) to learn about the background of the song and the people who created it, here is a wonderful, informative post by Aimsel Ponti. 

And, if you'd like to send a love-note to the Bengsons, here is their Facebook page.


Tuesday, November 3, 2020

Good news about Re-wilding Our Planet

Hello friends - Just last week we were looking out our backyard window during midday and there was a beautiful, full-grown grey fox just sauntering through our meadow! We'd been having concern that the three neighborhood cats who consider our 3-acres their backyard, have been over-hunting the rodents that also call our place home, thereby reducing food for the wild creatures that depend on them. But sight of the fox eased my fears. He or she looked radiant with health with a thick and lustrous coat and tail. No signs of hunger there!

Grey Fox - image credit: Susan Tenney

Here's a re-post of an article I wrote a few years ago on our Sharing Gardens site about living cooperatively with the wild animals in our small-town/rural neighborhood. 


It seems we could all use some good news about things that are going right on the planet these days. Here are a multitude of articles I came across recently about efforts to preserve habitat, and breed endangered animals for re-release back into the wild.

Ambitious Reforestation Project Will Plant 3 Million Trees in Uganda  

How maverick re-wilders are trying to turn back the tide of extinction

With 14,000 Critical Acres Added to Montana Wildlife Reserve, It May Become the Largest in the Lower 48

Ducks Unlimited and the University of Florida working together for conservation at the DeLuca Preserve 

Gone For a Century, Plant Finally Shows Itself When Conservation Work on ‘Ghost Pond’ Stirs Up Hidden Seed 

China's Yangtze River Basin to Recover Biodiversity 

50 Countries Just Joined New Coalition to Protect 30% of the Planet’s Land and Oceans By Decade’s End

There are lots of small ways we can each help create a healthier planet, through our consumer choices and the way we live our lives. Thank you to each of you reading this for all the ways you are contributing to solutions! Love, Llyn




Monday, November 2, 2020

Election - a poem


 ELECTION — a poem by Alfred K. LaMotte:

I voted.

I voted for the rainbow.

I voted for the cry of a loon.

I voted for my grandfather’s bones
that feed beetles now.

I voted for a singing brook that sparkles
under a North Dakota bean field.

I voted for salty air through which the whimbrel flies
South along the shores of two continents.

I voted for melting snow that returns to the wellspring
of darkness, where the sky is born from the earth.

I voted for daemonic mushrooms in the loam,
and the old democracy of worms.

I voted for the wordless treaty that cannot be broken
by white men or brown, because it is made of star semen,
thistle sap, hieroglyphs of the weevil in prairie oak.

I voted for the local, the small, the brim
that does not spill over, the abolition of waste,
the luxury of enough.

I voted for the commonwealth of the ancient forest,
a larva for every beak, a wing-tinted flower
for every moth’s disguise, a well-fed mammal’s corpse
for every colony of maggots.

I voted for open borders between death and birth.

I voted on the ballot of a fallen leaf of sycamore
that cannot be erased, for it becomes the dust and rain,
and then a tree again.

I voted for more fallow time to cultivate wild flowers,
more recess in schools to cultivate play,
more leisure, tax free, more space between days.

I voted to increase the profit of evening silence
and the price of a thrush song.
I voted for ten million stars in your next inhalation.

—Alfred K. LaMotte